The system is similar to Reben's fortune cookie generator, but instead he plied the algorithm with the text of TED Talks from months and years past.

The AI spit out a series of largely nonsensical phrases and Reben curated the best.

"The thing that's hard is to make a thread of a story, because the ideas change so quickly in this sort of output," he said.

Feed it a library

Reben's system produces seemingly disjointed thoughts like 'I am a bad situation' because it's able to recognize structure and syntax, but not necessarily appropriate word placement.

Take two typical fortunes: one could say 'your days will be filled with happiness,' while another says 'you'll never be depressed.'

The AI might flip some words around and come up with 'you'll never be happy.' It's still a fortune, but not the optimistic prophecy one expects after dinner.

The limits of fortune or speech writing artificial intelligence aren't yet clear, Reben says. While you could feed a machine hundreds of poems, it would likely create something similar to what it has already read, instead of creating a fresh product.

'I kind of like the more existential dread ones,' said Reben about his AI-based fortune cookie fortune generator. (Alexander Reben)

Reben is interested in what would happen if you fed it an entire library.

"What if you went even larger and trained it on literature, whether it be poetry or a play or a novel, and have it maybe invent a genre of writing that we've never seen before, haven't even thought about as humans," he asked.

The challenge he's facing is that creativity isn't necessarily structured or logical, and Reben believes AI might hit a wall creatively. As it stands, humans are probably better served with an AI that recognizes stop signs in a self-driving car.

"Or there could be some breakthrough where it makes poetry that we find awful, but may be stimulating for other machine learning systems which judge poetry."

To hear more from Alexander Reben, download our podcast or click the 'Listen' button at the top of this page.

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